Late or out of place corn plants rarely produce an economical return in modern corn production. As a result, farmers invest heavily in planter technologies designed to increase the number of plants expected to produce a fully developed ear, as a percentage of the total plants that emerge. For example, if a farmer plants 34,000 seeds per acre, he expects (based on the pure live seed rating of his seed lot) at least 95% of the seeds to produce an emerging seedling. Until electronic innovations in planter row units became commercially available, data typically showed that perhaps only 80-90% of those emerging plants would produce a uniform and timely seedling under average conditions. Expressed as a percentage, this is referred to in the industry as the Net Effective Stand % (NES). Planter improvements have increased NES to perhaps 90% or more, removing approximately half of the non-effective plants. That still leaves approximately (conservatively) at least 5% of the plants as non-effective. In a stand of 34,000, this would represent 1700 or more plants that are in effect, weeds.
In other words, every 1% improvement in NES stands results in approximately 300 plants per acre, or over 2 bushels/acre, which on 80 million acres results in a gross benefit of 160 million bushels of corn, or nearly $0.5B in revenue.
However, determining the location of such underperforming plants remains elusive, since they can be virtually anywhere within the stand. The task of finding them manually is costly and unrealistic. For example, evaluating plant stands such as corn have up until recently required manual counting and visual characterization by an agronomist or trained practitioner. In fact, such an evaluation is only conducted on an infrequent basis, and even then, only with small subsamples within a given field. More recently, unmanned aerial vehicles have developed camera technologies and applications to count individual plants, however, such technology has been unable to detect and/or quantify characteristics of individual plants. The remaining non-effective members of the population in the field therefore consume resources without the desired outcome.
What is needed in the art is a system and method for determining characteristics of individual plants, newly emergent and during the growing season, in an automated and efficient manner, then subsequently managing the plant stand, thereby optimizing the NES and harvest for the entire population.